Readings: Isaiah 25:6-9; Romans 5: 5-11; Luke 7:11-17
Theme: Nothing can come between us and the love of God
By Michael McCabe, SMA
‘Indeed for your faithful, Lord, life is changed not ended, and, when this earthly dwelling turns to dust, an eternal dwelling is made ready for them in heaven.’ (Preface for the Dead, no. 1). In the face of death the Church confidently proclaims that God created each person for eternal life and that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, by his death and resurrection, has broken the chains of sin and death that bound humanity. All who are baptised in Christ share in his victory over death and nothing can separate us from God’s love. As St Paul declares exultantly in his Letter to the Romans: ‘I am certain of this; neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, nor any power, nor the heights, nor the depths, nor any created thing whatever, will be able to come between us and the love of God, known to us in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom 8:38-39).
Our readings today help us to commemorate (and pray for) our deceased loved ones, those who have gone ahead of us ‘marked with the sign of faith’, in the light of this unconquerable hope. The first reading from the prophet Isaiah, tells us that the Lord will prepare a lavish banquet for all peoples. He will ‘remove the mourning veil covering all peoples, and the shroud enwrapping all nations, he will destroy death forever’ (Is 25:8). In our second reading, St Paul reminds us that this hope of a final and enduring victory over sin and death ‘is not deceptive because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us’ (Rom 5:5).
The gospel reading from Luke recounts the moving miracle of Jesus restoring a young man to life. Unlike most of the miracles of Jesus, this one does not begin with someone asking him for help. Luke describes the event with admirable simplicity and clarity. As Jesus and his disciples approach the village of Nain they come upon a funeral procession. A young man is being carried out for burial, ‘the only son of his mother, and she was a widow’ (Lk 7:12). Without a husband and sons, the situation of the grief-stricken widow is desperate. Moved with compassion (the translation ‘he felt sorry for her’ is weak), Jesus immediately reaches out to her and tells her not to cry. He then puts his hand on the bier, stops the procession, and commands the young man to get up. Which he does, to the great astonishment and rejoicing of the accompanying crowd. In telling this story, Luke adds an important detail. After raising the young man to life, Jesus ‘gave him back to his mother’ (Lk 7:15). Responding to the mother’s grief was as much the concern of Jesus as the restoration of the young man to life.
For all of us here, today’s commemoration triggers memories of the many ‘faithful departed’ whose lives have touched ours profoundly: parents, grandparents, brothers sisters, relatives and friends. We all have our own special memories of them, memories that ‘bless and burn’, to quote the title of a song by the pop group ‘Dry Branch Fire Squad. They burn because they remind us of a physical presence gone forever. But the memories also bless us. They become sacramental moments that keep alive our communion with them. The Monaghan poet, Patrick Kavanagh, evokes this sense of communion in his lovely poem In Memory of My Mother.
The poem ends with these lines:
“O you are not lying in the wet clay.
For it is a harvest evening now and we
Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight
And you are smiling up at us –eternally.”
However, our communion with our loved ones ‘gone ahead of us’ is not confined to the memories of beautiful moments from the past. While physically absent from us, we must not think of them as totally absent. In a real sense they remain in communion with us, as we continue on our pilgrim journey towards that awesome destiny God has prepared for all those who love him – ‘what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived’ (I Cor 2:9). The great German theologian, Karl Rahner. reminds us of this important truth in the following reflection, with which I conclude this homily.
‘The great and sad mistake of many people, among them, even pious persons, is to imagine that those whom death has taken, leave us. They do not leave us. They remain….We do not see them, but they see us. Their eyes, radiant with glory, are fixed upon our eyes full of tears. Though invisible to us, our dead are not absent.
‘I have often reflected upon the surest comfort for those who mourn. It is this: a firm faith in the real and continual presence of our loved ones; it is the clear and penetrating conviction that death has not destroyed them, nor carried them away. They are not even absent, but living near to us, transfigured: having lost, in their glorious change, no delicacy of their soul, no tenderness of their hearts, nor especial preference in their affection. On the contrary, they have, in depth and fervour of devotion, grown larger a hundredfold. Death is, for the good, a translation into light, into power, into love. Those who on earth were only ordinary Christians become perfect, those who were good become sublime.’
Listen to an alternative audio Homily by Tom Casey, SMA: